12
Mar
People always come and go. Like ants they come in and take whatever they can carry on their backs away with them – parts of me, parts of my mother. Whole things we own. Sometimes I feel like I can see this giant hourglass on our kitchen table, and these ants, they come in and steal the grains right out, leaving less and less for my mom and me.
I don’t think she cares, though. Her desert has long been tapped – she’s just moving, being, maybe even seeing. Her time is all borrowed, and what difference if the grains they steal are mine, my time?
No difference.
I’m breaking out my telescope again tonight. Like every other night this past month. I train it on this or that window of the hotel across the street. There are so many lives being lived, so many ways of being to see in the small, grimy frames that make the light within all the more dazzling. Blinding.
There is plenty of sex. There are also plenty of old, lonely men who wear long coats and settle into their beds early, fixated on their television sets but with eyes that are glassy, glassy. There are wild women with bruises who sleep with the lamps on and stir every half hour or so – a flinch, a glass of water, the bedside Bible cracked open.
Sometimes there are parties. Drinking and laughing, yelling and fighting, music, movies. Beautiful girls. I look down at my own slender thighs – bird legs, says my mom – or grab my tiny breasts and squeeze, and pretend it’s them, their bodies in my hands. I watch them flirt with drunken pigs of men, men that might one day find their way into this very apartment, into my mother’s room. They’ll meander down the hallway that she’s strung up with white Christmas lights “for ambience.” They’ll come and go.
Before I only watched, passive. Now I need them, I need these people – they are more real than my mom, more real than the ants. Certainly more real than me? Their very transience seems to confirm it – they walk in and out of my life unknowing, they are allowed to leave the world we briefly cohabit. They are pristine because I can’t touch them; if we ever met on the street below it would be ruined, lost. Our connection can only be forged within the blocky snow globe of the hotel sitting in my hands, and I am the one shaken.
Tonight is bitter and clear. Across the way a new development – the door cracks open in the room directly in front of me. A woman enters in a short blue dress and legs forever. She goes straight into the bathroom without the slightest glance around. More legs, less shapely, follow – gawky arms and long red hair. Freckles. Clear green eyes older than the rest of her – fourteen, maybe fifteen. Same as me.
Her mother comes out and goes for the door, backtracks and slaps a clumsy kiss onto her cheek before slipping out for, I understand, the rest of the night. The girl looks around and flops down onto the bed, testing it. Her overnight bag has become a pillow, and she rests for a moment before sitting up and unzipping it.
Inventory:
four books, the names of which I try to know but which no amount of squinting throws into relief.
a photograph in a small, gilt frame – this she sets on the nightstand.
a water bottle
a small brass tube(?)
This last she pockets and stands up, comes to the window – almost casually.
She glances around, down, up.
She pulls out the tube and it – expands. And I get it.
She holds it up to her eye and looks directly at me.
I duck below the sill, but I know she has seen me from the ‘o’ her lips fell into before I lost sight.
She sees me.
I slowly stand up and settle back in front of the telescope.
There she is, still looking at me. Then, the unthinkable: she raises her hand in a weak greeting. I raise mine. It feels too light, as if a helium balloon is beneath it, pushing it into the hello position.
She looks behind her and back to me, and then she points down. To the street. This is not in my rules.
I just stare at her. I see that her lips are slightly chapped from the cold. Her hair is tucked behind her ears and they are pierced. Her eyebrows are thick and expressive.
She shrugs, starts to lower her little telescope – I put my hand up to stop her.
I point down.
She smiles.
I grab my jacket and put on my sneakers. I struggle into a sweatshirt and throw the jacket on over it, pulling the hood out. I peek into my mother’s room, but she is already gone.
Maybe they know each other.
I grab my key and escape out the door. Down the stairs, another door. A blast of cold and I’m outside, looking into the front door of the hotel. The air seems to settle around my skin and I intuit it rather than feel it.
And here are her eyes. So green. She walks across the street that divides us, across the invisible barrier that I set there. Smiles. Her bottom lip splits and a bead of blood begins to grow there. Now she is here, not two feet away from me.
I reach out and wipe her lip with my thumb, and smile back.
(A flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig over at Terribleminds.)
